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First humans to leave Africa went to China, not Europe

By Andy Coghlan

THE first humans to leave Africa decamped to far east Asia, not Europe. A trove of ancient teeth found in a cave in China adds evidence to the idea that humans reached the region thousands of years before they made it to Europe.

The find suggests that modern humans reached China between 80,000 and 120,000 years ago. That challenges the widespread assumption that humans didn’t leave Africa until 60,000 years ago. It’s further evidence that Homo sapiens may have left Africa several times, says María Martinón-Torres of University College London. “It means we have to re-think different models of our dispersal.”

“We have to rethink our species’ dispersal. Early humans may have left Africa several times”

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Our species emerged some 200,000 years ago in Africa and didn’t make it to Europe until some 35,000 years ago. Martinón-Torres thinks that a combination of the competition from Neanderthals and the cold ice-age conditions may have kept them at bay. “Homo sapiens is a tropical species, so it was easier for them to move east than north,” she says.

Martinón-Torres and her team found 47 teeth belonging to at least 13 H. sapiens individuals in the Fuyan cave in Daoxian, south-east China. The teeth were found under a layer of stalagmites that formed after the teeth were deposited there (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature15696). “The stalagmites are at least 80,000 years old, so that’s the minimum age of the teeth,” says Martinón-Torres. Given that the animal bones found at the same site were typical of the Late Pleistocene, this puts the upper age limit at 120,000 years ago.

Last year, Christopher Bae of the University of Hawaii described two teeth of modern humans in China, which suggested people reached the area as early as 100,000 years ago. He agrees that Martinón-Torres’s study further weakens the traditional ‘out-of-Africa-60,000-years-ago’ model.

So what became of those early arrivals? “We don’t know what happened to the population, whether they simply vanished, and China was repopulated later, or whether they interacted with other hominins,” says Martinón-Torres.

She hopes to find out if the ancient humans interacted with more primitive hominins already there, such as Homo erectus. She also calls for studies to see if these early arrivals in China have left a genetic imprint on people living there today.

(Image: S. Xing and X-J. Wu)

This article appeared in print under the headline “First humans to leave Africa went to China”